Bildungsroman: The Trials of Transitory Transformation

My senior year of high school, 2004

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Coming-of-age is terrifying and speaking as someone who turned 40 several months ago, so much of my life has not gone the way I imagined it would when I was younger. When I was a child, an hour felt like days but now that I’m reaching middle-age I feel as though a week passes as quickly as a day.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where my life has gone and how quickly time has passed. I’ve been reflecting on the advice that older people gave me when I was younger, about how I needed to go to new places and do new things, and that somehow my life would slow down through the experiencing process. Unfortunately, I have not found that to be true. Instead, I have found that the only thing that is true is that change is the only constant, that impermanence is the only absolute.

I have begun to think that I need to focus more on what I’ve gained from experiences and less on trying to have more and more of them in a futile attempt to slow down time. For example, courage and authenticity are things I’ve really taken to heart over the years. Life is an adventure and like any adventure things don’t always go to plan. What’s important is to not get caught up in the mistakes and choose instead to simply acknowledge them as the learning experiences they are and move on the wiser.

When I was 16, I was too afraid of the social pressures of conformity and the risk of receiving judgement to feel like I could live authentically. Years of my life were spent in pain pretending to be someone I wasn’t just to feel like I could fit in and be accepted. But the person the people around me accepted was not me, only a shadow of who I really was, a mask I put on to feel normal and safe.

When I was 22 and had just been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps I realized that I would rather live an authentic life not knowing what was to come than to die having lived a life not my own. It was in that experience that I learned courage was self-acceptance and authenticity.

Life is about letting go of the desire to control everything, that was a lesson I had to learn too. Not all of my goals would be accomplished, not all of my dreams would come true. I had to stop seeing myself as a failure and start seeing myself as a person.

The hardest thing we will ever do is be ourselves in a world that constantly tells us that we are never enough, to let go of other people’s expectations for who we are and how we choose to live our lives. This is particularly true in our teens and early adult years, what is frequently referred to these days as the “emerging adult” phase of life.

It is a time in our lives when we are becoming our own person with our own identity outside of our old life, old friendships, away from our parents and family, and perhaps most importantly separating ourselves from our old actions, beliefs, and choices. We are becoming someone new, someone changed by time, experience, and consequence, and that transformation is often fraught with confusion, questioning, pain and an unbecoming of the old self to make room for a more authentic self.

This unbecoming can feel scary because it means letting go. We humans love to hold on, hold on to the past, to familiar ideals, old narratives, old stories, to our old selves because old feels comfortable, but growth does not come from what is comfortable or easy, it comes from the unknown, from adversity.

Everything in life is like leaves falling from a tree, we can’t force them all to land where we want, only some. I have learned that we need to just admire them as they fall into their own self-directed place and appreciate the beauty that chaos and impermanence brings.

While I think the advice that those older people told me when I was young about how I needed to travel was good advice to access opportunities for experience, I don’t think it was helpful in discovering more about who I am as a person. Far too often we travel abroad or go out into the wilderness in the hopes of finding ourselves only to discover that what we’re really doing is attempting to escape ourselves in a new location.  Only to learn that we are everywhere we go. The best we can hope for is to come back from those voyages understanding that the only path we ever needed to traverse was inward to begin the hard work of personal development. To “come home” as they say, to know ourselves perhaps for the first time in our lives.

Life is strange, I admit we often do need to be removed from our normal circumstances, either in the sense of ordinary physical location or in mental routine, multiple times before we finally see that the common denominator in what troubles us is actually us and the massively unanswered question of who we are.  It is a lesson in self-actualization, self-acceptance, and more often than not self-forgiveness. 

The most difficult challenge any of us will ever face in life is to master ourselves. Doing this is both a quiet and a lonely path, one without audience or fanfare, a long and arduous path of painful truths that reveal secrets and trauma deeply held, and the letting go of the falsehoods we conceal ourselves behind in fear of disappointment and judgement. It is a transformation into authenticity, delivered in solitude, and we are both the giver and the gift.

One of the biggest hurdles I needed to face between the ages of 14 and 22 was my mental health, something that no older person ever gave me advice about until it was already too late and I was in the deepest, darkest places mentally. My story is not uncommon, for most people that timespan between 10 and 24 years of age is saturated with mental health hardship and the vast majority of us are woefully unprepared to endure it because such topics were not part of standard school curriculum nor common conversations within our households growing up.

At any given moment, 31 million Americans are struggling with a mental health condition, 19 million are struggling with a substance use disorder, and 11 million are contemplating suicide.

Mental health issues are widespread and very common as 1 in 5 Americans are currently living with a mental health condition or substance use disorder, 1 in 2 will struggle with either or both at some point in their lifetime and 50% of them will experience the onset of symptoms by age 14.  The majority of which will not actively seek treatment due to a variety of reasons, including stigma, cost, and physical access to services.

Statistically, someone experiencing a mental health crisis is more likely to be a victim of a crime than the perpetrator of it, yet we often see in film and television that people experiencing a mental health crisis are dangerous or scary. The statistics range depending on what organization we collect the data from, but reports suggest that anywhere from 10 – 30% of Americans with mental illness will have an encounter with law enforcement at some point, but the majority of these encounters include petty infractions like jaywalking and disorderly conduct, as well as substance use.  Violent crimes are in the minority of encounters.

As someone who has lived with a serious mental health condition for more than twenty-five years I know all too well the consequences of untreated mental illness, as well as the lack of education about mental health and the relevant signs and symptoms of mental illness. Mental health conditions are still shunned today, but they are far better understood than they were 50, 40, or even 30 years ago.

Someone once asked me to describe what it’s like having a serious mental illness and so I described it as the following…

Having a mental illness is like walking along a rocky seaside shore enjoying the warm sun, the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore, the seafaring birds calling from above you in the sky, and the sounds of children laughing, people wave at you and ask you to join them and have a wonderful time.

Then suddenly you slip on a wet rock and hurdle down into the sea below, so quickly your brain couldn’t even register what was happening, let alone allow you the chance to call out for help.

You plunge into the water down below in a dizzying flurry, you can’t tell which direction is up and you can’t see a damn thing.

When you finally get your bearings, you swim up and break the surface only to realize the waves have carried you far from the shore.

Making your way back you quickly become fatigued.  As you try to climb back up the wet rocks, their slipperiness makes it so difficult and behind you the waves keep crashing, slamming you into them.  The waves keep coming, wave after wave after wave.

Exhausted and feeling helpless you convince yourself there is no hope, you’ll never crawl up the rocks, especially not while the waves keep crashing against you.

It’s taking everything you have just to tread water and keep your head above the surface.  The longer you fight the more disoriented you become, no longer does the sun, the birds, or the laughter pass through your thoughts.

All you know is the pain from the battering waves, the agony of the taunting rocks, and just how immensely tired you are.

You look up and see people walking along the shore, you motion to them hoping they will notice you.  They stop and shout down to you, “Hey, why are you down there, it’s not safe you should climb back up,” and then continue on their way.

Others pass by and shout, “Just climb up the rocks, it’s easy to do.”  Others, completely oblivious that you are struggling, shout, “Isn’t it a wonderful day for a swim?”

When you manage to call out for help, some answer back, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy right now.”  Others reply, “This is scary and it looks really tough, I can’t deal with this today.”  Still others shout, “Looks like you’re in a bad place right now, let me know if you ever wanna talk,” as they walk away.

Something that I have been noticing more and more frequently in recent years is psychosis in teens and young adults. If you attend a mental health conference (as I do) it’s a topic that is getting a lot of attention, much of it related to substance use triggering the onset of psychosis in teens and young adults. As someone who had experience with short-term psychosis in my early twenties, I know it’s a topic that makes people uncomfortable and fearful. If we are living in a world where more teens and young adults will be experiencing psychosis as part of their coming-of-age story then I think it’s a topic that deserves a little more attention when we talk about the challenges of this phase of our lives.

I experienced auditory and visual hallucinations in my early twenties where the things I saw and heard were, in many ways, very real to me and indiscernible from any other person who could be in the room speaking with me. I could see them and hear them like any other living thing, I could have conversations with them.  However, the beings that talked to me were floating disembodied heads. Their voices were loud and angry, telling me horrible things about myself and other people, telling me to do horrible things to myself and other people.

Today, I am a certified peer specialist in the mental health industry and I know a whole hell of a lot more about mental health conditions and substance use challenges than I did back then. But still, even at that young age, I knew the things I was seeing and hearing were not actually real, no matter how real they appeared or sounded, I knew that they couldn’t possibly be real because they defied everything I knew to be possible. Floating disembodied heads that talk are not real, voices telling me to kill myself didn’t make logical sense, no amount of reasoning could justify their existence or the truthfulness of what they were telling me.

Perhaps if these things had happened to me when I was even younger it’s possible I could have believed they were real, but at the time I experienced them I had already determined that I didn’t believe in ghosts, demons, spirits, or any supernatural stuff and I’ve always been a very skeptical person. The floating heads screaming at me may as well have looked like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, and I would not have thought them any more absurd.

This of course was just my experience, not everyone has the same experience, and I do believe that some people are more impressionable than others, particularly due to age, skill in mindfulness, level of skepticism, cultural and religious background, and personal life experience.

When I was younger I had a friend who lived with schizophrenia, and early in his diagnosis he didn’t always take his medication routinely. One time when we were hanging out he forgot his meds and skipped a dose or two. That night he began seeing what he described as demons dancing around the room playing musical instruments, he said I was a demon too. He got up and went outside after feeling overwhelmed by everything he was seeing and hearing. He knew these things couldn’t be real and yet they seemed to be really happening and he became afraid.

In both of our experiences we were always in control of our actions, we could still think for ourselves in a rational way because hallucinations and delusional thinking are not the same thing despite how often people use these terms interchangeably as though they describe the same experience.  While hallucinations through psychosis may be co-occurring with delusional thinking, this is not always the case and should not always be assumed to be present.

We could debate whether or not psychosis is ever a standalone mental health condition that can be diagnosed separately from any other, but I am of the opinion that it is always a symptom of some other cause, whether that be mental illness, brain injury, or substance use.

As already noted, violence in psychosis is not a common event, in fact most people who experience it are far more likely to be victims of others who take advantage of them in their vulnerable state than they are to be the perpetrators of violent crimes themselves. In cases where they do inflict violence it’s almost always a process of escalation building up to that level where warning signs and behavioral symptoms have been ignored, downplayed, or simply gone unaddressed.

The things I described about my friend and I’s experiences were happening to us without the necessity of any illicit substances, but substance use triggering mental illness, and specifically psychosis, is becoming more common as both legal and illicit use continues to incorporate newer organic, genetically modified, and synthetic substances as an unhealthy coping mechanism for the challenges teens and young adults face while going through the coming-of-age phase in their lives. Although, I’ve recently learned that children as young as 10 are also now experiencing substance-induced psychosis due to the ease of availability.

While adverse experiences remain the predominant and primary trigger for the onset of mental health conditions in children, teens, and young adults, hallucinogens (also known as psychedelics) are substances that alter brain chemistry and disrupt the brain’s ability to connect with physical reality.  We’re talking LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, cannabis, and MDMA (ecstasy) – which has a dual classification as a stimulant.  These substances and others are a secondary factor in circumstances where adverse childhood experiences are not the primary factor.  Genetic susceptibility is always a potential contributing factor.

Substance use or self-medicating as a maladaptive coping mechanism is extremely common in those with a mental health condition. This behavior frequently leads to dependency or addiction and compounds the symptoms of the mental health condition, exacerbating it by creating a co-occurring condition. Creating a situation where the person is now facing both a mental health condition and a substance use challenge.  Other common substance groups used for maladaptive coping include analgesics, depressants, and stimulants.

Substance use has not been an ever-present or prolonged part of my journey with a mental health condition. I’ve never used any illicit substance, I never smoked so much as a cigarette. While I tended to avoid alcohol (a type of depressant) as I never enjoyed the taste, I did get blackout drunk at a wedding in my twenties after getting dumped by my date just days before the wedding. After that experience, I swore I’d never get drunk again, and I haven’t. I no longer drink alcohol at all.

I was pre-disposed to developing a mental health condition due to genetics, but the onset of symptoms did not occur until being triggered during adolescence, a time when adverse experiences were occurring one after another and being layered on top of each other. Childhood sexual and physical trauma, psychological abuse, and religious trauma were the precursors to my foray into mental illness.

My symptoms really became visible at age 14, expressed via depression and suicidal ideation that I wrote about at the time in a private journal. I believe early medical/psychological intervention could have prevented the worst things that were yet to come had my parents been educated on what signs to look for and how to effectively react because the warning signs were brought to their attention when they found and read my journal.

They asked me about the journal but didn’t take it seriously when I lied to their faces and said it was just creative writing. They knew that something was happening to me, they didn’t understand it and chose not to take action, whether that was due to lack of knowledge, lack of will, or fear of knowing the truth and the false belief that shame or guilt would be brought on to the family by accepting and embracing the truth.

At age 16, I attempted suicide. Neither they nor anyone else found out about this event until years later. Where my parents fumbled, one of my high school teachers succeeded. She intervened when I was 17, slowly and subtly building a rapport and trust relationship with me when she noticed the warning signs and the behavioral symptoms being expressed. She knew what to look for because she herself was struggling with a mental health condition, something she shared with me during our conversations.

I think in today’s world, she would have been fired from her job had the school found out that she was spending time with me outside of school, even inviting me to her house. From their perspective it probably would have looked like she was grooming me, and it’s possible people in town may have thought we were in some kind of sexual relationship because we would go out to eat and to the movies together. But that was not at all the nature of our time together.

What was really happening was that she was giving me stability and a support system, a safe space to talk about what I was experiencing. I had nowhere to go, I had no one else I felt I could turn to. Through this trust relationship, she got me to open up about what I was experiencing and was able to connect me to a mental health counselor when I turned 18.

I wish I could tie this into a cute little bow and give a perfect ending after her subtle intervention, but in reality a lot of wild experiences happened over the next few years, including different diagnoses, the hallucinations I previously mentioned, more suicidality, hospitalization, ruined relationships, an abrupt military discharge, other self-destructive behavior, and years of medication and therapy, but her early intervention was truly the beginning of my recovery journey and she is one of a few critical people who saw and heard me and intervened, and she is one of the reasons I am alive today.

Throughout my time at high school she kept me alive. She showed me that life with a mental health condition was possible, that I could keep going and grow successfully into adulthood, that what I was experiencing was not the end of my life but a mere detour, she gave me connection and perhaps more importantly she gave me hope. She saved my life, a fact I have shared with her on several occasions.

The life we are living when we are young is not the life we will live when we’re older. The experiences we’re having, no matter how dark they may be at the time, are transitory – they do not last forever. The thing about youth is that it blinds us to the impermanence of time. We believe that the way our lives are in any given moment will be that way forever. It is so very hard to see beyond today, every moment feels like an eternity and the possibility of change or transformation sounds unachievable. The path toward progress feels daunting and overwhelming because we focus so much on the end that we fail to understand that it can only be accomplished by taking small steps at a time. Instead of looking at the horizon, it is better to look at the ground with every step we take.

The greatest lesson that Buddhism ever taught me was that change is the only absolute. The day I truly embraced that notion was a day of liberation for me. Did it cure me of my mental health struggles? No, because that’s not possible, but what did change was my perspective, my understanding of and expectations for myself, and my interpretation of my pain, and of life in general.

The first time my teacher from high school talked to me about my mental health and shared with me her own struggles, I cried, and I did so not just because it was a sad conversation but because for the first time in my life I didn’t feel alone and not feeling alone is a big step in the healing process.

Recovery is possible and it doesn’t always mean someone is cured.  Many mental health conditions cannot be cured, which is why it is classified as a disorder instead of disease.  Recovery is not a static point in time, it’s not marked by a single event or some kind of finish line.  It’s difficult and challenging, and there are external barriers, internal obstacles, and setbacks. Recovery is a state of being, an ongoing effort to remain in equilibrium. Living life in recovery is possible, and all the ups and downs are worth it.

I could have died as a teenager in 2002, but I didn’t. I could have missed out on so much, but I haven’t.  Make no mistake, a lot of unfortunate stuff has happened along the way and continues to happen.  I have lost cherished people who I thought would be a part of my life for decades to come.  The loss of Ricardo Reyes in 2022 was particularly hard for me because it was so unexpected, he had been a part of my life for almost twenty years, and he kept me alive after my discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps with his patience, grace, acceptance, and support as I stumbled and crawled my way back from that pit of shame, confusion, regret, isolation, and self-hatred.

There is a time and a place for grief, there is a time to cry and wallow in despair, we must make space in our lives to embrace and reflect on our experiences and the emotions that come with them, and we must work our way through all of life’s hardships, both the emotional and the clinical, but I also think that it’s important to remember that these things should be acknowledged as temporary moments and experiences.  The memories may last, but the events do not and the negative effects of those events also shouldn’t last.

Living with a mental health condition or substance misuse means carrying both the weight of struggle and the fragile hope of survival. What has kept me here has been a combination of treatment, even when imperfect, and human connection, even when fleeting. These small but powerful interventions have mattered as much as any prescribed medication.

More than twenty-five years into this journey, I can say that survival has not been about one single breakthrough but about a series of moments, moments of help accepted, moments of kindness offered, moments of realizing I wasn’t entirely alone. My coming-of-age story isn’t about being cured; it’s about learning to keep living despite the darkness, and accepting that pain does not have to define the whole of my existence.

Recovery for me has always been a journey and not a destination. The expectation that recovery does not include relapse is a delusion that time will break for those who believe it.  Relapse is not the end of the road, it is merely a detour. The dream that I will one day wake up and everything will be wonderful from that point forward had to be shattered in order for me to fully embrace recovery. The understanding that I’ll have good days, months, or years, but just as equally have bad days, months, or years, was a lesson I needed to learn and I’m grateful I learned it in my early twenties.

Change is not only possible, it is the only absolute. Remembering that has saved me from a lot of unnecessary suffering. I learned this lesson when I converted to Buddhism, it was one of the best decisions of my life and the most important one along my journey. I do not believe I would have survived my early twenties if I had not embraced the Dharma.

If I spent all of my time dwelling on all of the negatives over the last two decades I’d have never noticed or experienced the profound moments I’ve been able to witness and live through. If you or someone you know is not okay, there is hope and there is help.  There is life and there is joy on the other side of struggle.  And I don’t mean that fake happiness that people pretend to feel, I mean authentic joy that comes when it should and recedes when it must.

The lie people tell themselves of how they should be happy all the time is delusional thinking that causes more problems than it solves.  Happiness is an emotion and emotions fluctuate, we can no more be happy and mentally well all the time than we can be angry, guilty, sad, or any other emotion.  Like everything in life, emotions are impermanent.  Freedom comes when we let go of the lie of permanence.

From a mental health perspective, we all want autonomy, self-efficacy, and to live a self-directed life. I have always found that the biggest impediment to this is misunderstanding what it means to be free. ​To be free is to no longer be at the mercy of our own expectations of others. What attitudes we expect others to have, what behaviors we expect others to enact, and what choices we expect others to make.

We do not get to control the internal motives or external actions of other people. The sooner we purge ourselves of this delusion the sooner we are liberated from the trappings of possessiveness, of cravings for power over others, of the self-righteous belief that we know what’s best for others and that others must satisfy our needs and wants. At no point in my life did I struggle with this more than in my teens and early twenties.

Perhaps the reason we try so desperately to control others is because most of the time we cannot even control our own feelings and thoughts, instead we merely find ourselves at the mercy of every fleeting internal and external sensation, reacting wildly to everything as though we are some kind of feral animal trapped in a corner with no way out.

But herein lay the truth, the only way out is in. If ever there was an obvious sign of mental wellbeing it is the ability to regulate our own desires and emotions by establishing healthy coping mechanisms, practicing awareness and mindfulness, and by not becoming a victim of our own delusions.

On the long road between childhood and adulthood there are many challenges, especially with mental health, but with some initiative to do the hard work of discovering who we are and letting go of the burdens we all too often choose to carry around, we can make it through this tumultuous time in our lives as better people than the ones we started as. We should also be so lucky as to find good people along the way who can support us without robbing us of our autonomy.

As an adult I have come to realize that the best people to bring into your life are those who allow you the space and time to live a self-directed life, who empower you without controlling you, and who do not hold you back or weigh you down.

To use a Buddhist analogy, think about a horse-drawn carriage traveling at night: there’s the horse, a driver, the carriage, and a lantern. In this analogy you do not want friends that are like the horse who has no concern for anyone but itself and who would run wild if given the chance except that it has no freedom of choice. Nor do you want a friend like the driver whose sole desire is to control and command. You also don’t want friends who are like the carriage that is simply along for the ride and exists without any impetus. Instead find friends like the lantern, who is always there ever-so-quietly shining a light on potential joys and potential dangers, not telling you where to go or what to do or who to be, just illuminating the darkness to reveal all possible paths with the reassurance and patience to wait for you to choose which way to go.